Payments Industry Elevates Trust As Priority

Sal Karakaplan, chief strategy officer at The Clearing House, names 'trust' the defining word for 2026 in the February What's Next in Payments discussion, citing new players, technologies and payment flows. He says reliability, security and measures like DDA tokenization underpin confidence as RTP reaches over 72% of demand deposit accounts and more than 1,200 banks, and warns AI, agentic payments and on-chain finance raise governance needs.